-70% Enemy Poison Resistance
+120% Poison Damage
Delirium will keep all of the monsters close together with confuse.
Headhunter's Glory will have to replace life leech, and I'll probably add Dracula's for more life-per-kill.

What I wanted to know was, does anyone on the forum have any suggestions for additional gear/changes?

its expensive, but i know Vorbiss (i think it was vorbiss) made extensive use of the 'charged item synergy' bug with the Carrion Wind unique ring. it has charges of lvl 21 Poison Creeper that count as synergy towards your rabies attack. he also had his armor and weapon and helm full of Poison Facet jewels to lower enemies resistance and increase your own damage. beyond that, i imagine that you want to wear pretty standard druid gear... Jalal's Mane, etc.

its expensive, but i know Vorbiss (i think it was vorbiss) made extensive use of the 'charged item synergy' bug with the Carrion Wind unique ring. it has charges of lvl 21 Poison Creeper that count as synergy towards your rabies attack. he also had his armor and weapon and helm full of Poison Facet jewels to lower enemies resistance and increase your own damage. beyond that, i imagine that you want to wear pretty standard druid gear... Jalal's Mane, etc.

Click to expand...

That's an excellent suggestion, as it will save you 20 skill points (the synergy only works if there's no points put into Poison Creeper). The down side is waiting until lvl 60+ to wear it, but that's not too bad.

Another good item is Trang Ouls gloves, adding +25% poison skill damage. You may also need a wand with lower resist charges for poison immunes.

If you have no qualms abt using bugs, as mentioned, using carrion wind allows you to have 20 more pts which you can place into fury. Then you could have a physical attack to complement your wolf while waiting for the poison timer to expire. The other effects also complement the build, poison nova on being hit, twister on striking(which activates pretty often with fury) helps keep monsters in place.

Only down-side is no vine to help you get rid of corpses (impt with greater mummies) and gain life.

Upgraded plague-bearer would be good for such a hybrid.

Also having some hit-monster flee somewhere could help. The monsters run away and infect other monsters. Rattle-cage could be a good mid-game armour with CB(works well with fury) and hit-monster flee(with rabies). Otherwise, you can craft a hit-power ammy for 10% hit-monster flee.

I would think poison nova on striking or being struck would be a bad idea, since it would counteract the poison from Rabies, no?

And personally I don't use the charged synergy bug. What's more, my Poison Creeper is already level 20. I don't like building characters around item exploits. I still shudder when I think about bugged items on battle.net, seeing level 800 Charged Bolt, Holy Fire, Teeth, Battle Orders... I don't see how you don't think that's not cheating, personally.

I would think that -50% enemy poison resistance would be a lot mroe useful than +5 Rabies. And I don't think that added poison damage counted towards Rabies damage, so there wouldn't be much point in that either.

For leeching purposes I could always keep a good Maul on weapon switch. But then, if I had a good amount of life per kill and my killing speed was good, that could work out I think. Not to mention Carrion Vine getting a % of creatures life every time one goes down.

I think, with the way I'm going now, I'll be able to max out Fury just fine.

And I forgot to put Trang's gloves, but they were intended to be there.

The poison from the nova would only counteract Rabies if it was a stronger poison (e.g. had a faster rate of poison damage per frame), which I think is a pretty unlikely scenario with maxed Rabies and Poison Creeper! Also, I believe that poison damage from items DOES affect Rabies--as far as the poison damage is concerned Rabies is just another poison source, and it combines with other sources in the usual way.

However, I'm with you on the "charged item synergy" issue--unless someone from Blizzard out and out says this is an intentional feature, I consider it a bug; and this ISN'T sour grapes because I don't have Marrowwalks or Carrion Wind rings to play with...

And personally I don't use the charged synergy bug. What's more, my Poison Creeper is already level 20. I don't like building characters around item exploits. I still shudder when I think about bugged items on battle.net, seeing level 800 Charged Bolt, Holy Fire, Teeth, Battle Orders... I don't see how you don't think that's not cheating, personally.

Click to expand...

(OTish) There's a hard cap of level 99 on skills now, and that applies to item-granted skills too. Guess Blizzard had the same opinion as you on those, although I would think level 800 Teeth might have been funny... (/OT)

Off-hand I can't think of any more improvements to suggest... maybe stick on either an Arachnid Mesh (more attack speed, life and damage through its +1 skills) or String of Ears (damage reduction), and possibly use a high physical-and-elemental-damage weapon on switch for smashing Poison Immune monsters.

(edit: oh, and if you use Arach Mesh don't use the Venom charges, obviously - they'll almost certainly mess up Rabies...)

The poison from the nova would only counteract Rabies if it was a stronger poison (e.g. had a faster rate of poison damage per frame), which I think is a pretty unlikely scenario with maxed Rabies and Poison Creeper! Also, I believe that poison damage from items DOES affect Rabies--as far as the poison damage is concerned Rabies is just another poison source, and it combines with other sources in the usual way.

However, I'm with you on the "charged item synergy" issue--unless someone from Blizzard out and out says this is an intentional feature, I consider it a bug; and this ISN'T sour grapes because I don't have Marrowwalks or Carrion Wind rings to play with...

Click to expand...

A few more notes:

1) Monsters who are already poisoned (by poison creeper etc) can be further affected by rabies. So there's a bit of timing as to when you bite a monster. Might have to decide between having a poison creeper or carrion vine out (possible just cast the right one at the right time. They die quite easily)

2) Poison immunes can also be infected with rabies and pass it to to others. They just don't damage from it.

3) An alternative weapon switch is the classic high elemental damage wands for PIs which you can buy off anya etc. Without +skills, they're cheap and are relatively fast with fury. Otherwise, I've always enjoyed the use of a buriza for the speedy physical/cold damage. Hellcast/gimmershard/baranar's star are the favoured weapons with high elemental damage.

Most of the info I've got are from the druid forum so apologises if any of it is wrong.